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Partnership Established to Decode Bowel Disease

By BiotechDaily International staff writersPosted on 25 Aug 2014

23andMe (Mountain View, CA,USA), a personal genetics company, is collaborating with Pfizer, Inc. (New York, NY, USA), in which the companies will seek to enroll 10,000 people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in a research project designed to explore the genetic factors associated with the onset, progression, severity, and response to treatments for IBD.

Approximately 1.4 million people in the United States alone suffer from IBD, according to estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; Atlanta, GA, USA). Although IBD is known to be more common in developed countries, the exact cause of this chronic disorder is still not determined, and there is no cure.

The collaboration represents a novel effort for both companies designed to study the underlying genetics of IBD and it is hoped that the project will in the end lead to possible new or optimized treatments for IBD. “We are excited to team up with Pfizer to take an innovative, consumer-centered approach to try to understand the fundamentals of inflammatory bowel disease and the variability of treatment response,” said 23andMe CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki.

“Pfizer is committed to bringing forward new treatments for patients suffering with IBD,” said Jose Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, senior vice president, biotherapeutics research and development, Pfizer. “By enhancing our understanding of the underlying biology of the disease, we hope to better support our clinical research activities and development programs.”